“Negatives are the notebooks, the jottings, the false starts, the whims, the poor drafts, and the good draft but never the completed version of the work. The completed version, a print, should be sufficient and fair return for a magazine’s investment, for it is the means of fulfilling the magazine’s purpose. The print and a proper one is the only completed photograph, whether it is specifically shaded for reproduction, or for a museum wall. Negatives are private, as is my bedroom.”

March 28, 2001

“I have a most peaceable disposition. My desires are for a modest hut, a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, very fresh milk and butter, flowers in front of my window and a few pretty trees by my door. And should the good Lord wish to make me really happy, he will allow me the pleasure of seeing about six or seven of my enemies hanged upon those trees.”

“Let’s suppose that this great idea works and the station actually starts making a lot money. Do you know what that can lead to, Andy? Memos. Before you know it, assigned parking spaces. Then chrome furniture, and lots of paintings of wistful children with big eyes. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen before!”

March 27, 2001

“It’s a, I say it’s a joke son. Don’t cha get it? You’re built too short, the good ones go over yer head. Ya got a hole in yer glove, boy, I keep pitching them and you keep missing them. Ya gotta keep yer eye on the ball, son. Eye. Ball. Eyeball. I almost had a funny there. Joke, that is.”

“It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary.”

“He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men, and the love of small children; who has filled his niche, and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty , or failed to express it; who has always looked for the best in others, and given them the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory a benediction.”

“A cup of coffee - real coffee - home-browned, home-ground, home-made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java: such a coffee is a match for twenty blue devils, and will exorcise them all.”

March 17, 2001

“The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.”

“The problem is that most corps think of their website as a marketing endeavor -- like a billboard -- instead of as a front office to their corporate headquarters. If they thought of their websites as places where they brought their clients, those websites would be much classier and elegant and usable -- same as their offices. You don’t let your marketing people run your front office; you shouldn’t let your marketing people run your website.”

March 15, 2001

“Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas ... with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether.”

March 14, 2001

“Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It’s like being posessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won’t let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you’re allowed to sleep. It’s always in the middle of the night, or you’re half-awake or tired, when your critical faculties are switched off. So letting go is what the whole game is. Every time you try to put your finger on it, it slips away. You turn on the lights and the cockroaches run away. You can never grasp them.”

“The advance planning and sense stimuli employed to capture a $10 million cigarette or soap market are nothing compared to the brainwashing and propaganda blitzes used to ensure control of the largest cash market in the world: the Executive Branch of the United States Government.”

“Some pictures are tentative forays without your even knowing it. They become methods. It’s important to take bad pictures. It’s the bad ones that have to do with what you’ve never done before. They can make you recognize something you hadn’t seen in a way that will make you recognize it when you see it again.”

March 11, 2001

“The professional, however, has all his energies directed to make things pay. He has too much at stake to speculate. He chooses the safest way. He is the true conservative, and when he gets hold of anything that works passable well, changes with reluctance. If an amateur experiments with a new toning bath on a batch of perhaps half-a-dozen prints, and fails, well the loss is not great, and he gains in knowledge and experience. But the professional has his batch of perhaps six hundred, and if he fail, the loss is something considerable...”

“The advance of photography is something like the progress of an army. The main body keeps in safe marching order, while the more daring and adventurous are the pioneers who lead the army - rushing here, feeling their way there; always skirmishing, often retiring, but eventually succeeding in finding new tracks and safe paths for the main body to securely pass along.”

March 10, 2001

“Once I traveled about in an old bakery wagon, a double-doored rattler with a mattress on the floor, I stopped where people stopped or gathered, I listened and looked and felt, and in the process had a picture of my country the accuracy of which was impaired only by my own shortcomings.”

“Your photography is a record of your living - for anyone who really sees. You may see and be affected by other people’s ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will have eventually to free yourself of them. That is what Nietzche meant when he said, ‘I have just read Schopenhauer, now I have to get rid of him.’ He knew how insidious other people’s ways could be, particularly those which have the forcefulness of profound experience, if you let them get between you and your own personal vision.”

March 07, 2001

“This company’s incompetence staggers us. Just when we think they can’t get any worse, they exceed all previous feats of non-service. A gibbon with an abacus would do a better job. Lord, if you are listening, smite these evil clowns.”

March 06, 2001

“If you can’t stand a little bloody nose, why don’t you go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wonderous, with treasures to satiate appetites both subtle and gross. But it’s not for the timid.”

“It is different for the web, and will always be different for the web, because the web is not a sheet of paper. It doesn’t have finite or even predictable dimensions. Its content is not static. It doesn’t have five centuries of process and tradition from which we can draw best practices. It cannot be expressed entirely as a Cartesian coordinate system in increments of six or twelve hundred. Nor will these things soon change.”

March 05, 2001

“As for company rules and policies, we have the Core Values and Belief’s, and our dress code - it’s good to be dressed. We also have one dress code recommendation - if you are going to be in a meeting with folks wearing suits, it’s recommended that you wear some form of footwear.”

Mike McQuary, President & C.O.O. MindSpring, circa 1996, the Good Ol’ Days

“What evil times are these, when passing ruffians can say ‘Nee’ at will to old women. There is a pestilence in this land. Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress.”